Rating: PG (If you saw the film you're old enough to read it.
Summary: Night never completely falls. Nathan in Nassau.
Acknowledgements: The lyrics in the coda are from Leonard Cohen's "The
Partisan." The title comes from a song within the film, Dire Straits'
"Brothers in Arms."
The money is gone, gone forever, but he sells his car and almost everything else he owns, and he goes to the island anyway.
He has enough to pay his plane and boat, enough to rent an airy hut near the harbor in Nassau and stand with the old men on the docks, enought to bet with them about which bird will fly off a wire first. Five dollars a bet.
He always loses.
"I don't gamble," he'd told Anne Cathgart, one snowy night in Berlin, when she tempted him with plane tickets to Monaco.
"Of course you do, Nathan," she said with a dark chocolate smile. "Just not on card games."
The memory of Berlin is the memory of bone-rattling chills, night after night, of snow in his eyes and wind chapping his skin, itchy cheap wool and overpriced liquor. His apartment was old and poorly heated. He slept in sweaters and spent as much time as possible in the office. It must have been summer there sometimes, but he only ever remembers the cold.
It was in Berlin that he vowed he would die someplace warm.
Not on a tile floor like Anne. Not in a cellar like Schmidt. Not in a snowbank like Roland the stenographer, who had a heart attack that last frigid January, before they left for Beirut. Roland spent 22 years at the bureau and smoked a carton of Camels a week. When an old lady found him frozen near her bus stop, he wasn't wearing any socks.
Another Caribbean sunset that defies the powers of poetry melts into the sea. Nothing on earth is cheaper than booze in the Bahamas, and when he runs out of the scotch Gladys gave him, he learns to like rum.
He drinks a lot these days. He plays a lot of chess.
When Nathan was seven years old his mother took him to the ocean. They stayed at a little hotel in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and Nathan picked up sandy shells all day long and brought them to his mother, who sat reading under a striped umbrella.
By the end of that first day, the top of his head was lightly pink with sunburn and he had built a wall of shells all around her, but the high tide rushed in and washed it out again. His mother only laughed.
"You can build it again tomorrow, Nathan," she said, and tucked the book under her arm, and led him off to a dinner of fried shrimp and hush puppies. That night they slept under an open window, and the waves rocked them to sleep, a metronome of crash and silence.
He hears from Gladys infrequently. She sends postcards with the Washington Monument and the White House on them. The first one said, simply, "Fired," but beneath the word she'd drawn a smiling face. The next one bore a photo of the Pentagon, another smiling face, and the words "Hired again."
He never writes back.
There is a picture by his bedside that arrived in the mail the same day as Gladys' two-weeks-late Christmas card. It is of a smiling baby boy in blue pajamas, with a Boy Scout cap drowning his newborn head. On the back, in a man's strong scrawl, is written, "Nathan Thomas Bishop, born November 15, 1991. 7 lb. 2 oz. 19 inches long."
Nassau is close enough to the equator that sunsets linger in a blue haze just over the watery horizon for hours after the flaming orange light disappears. Night never completely falls; even at 2 a.m. the lights in town blot out the lowest of the stars.
And in the evenings when he can't sleep, he sits on his gray-weathered porch, eyes closed, planter's punch singing in his veins, and listens to the tide wash the shells he's collected back into the sea.
I have changed my name so often I've lost my wife and children But I've many friends And some of them are with me ...
The money is gone, gone forever, but he sells his car and almost everything else he owns, and he goes to the island anyway.
He has enough to pay his plane and boat, enough to rent an airy hut near the harbor in Nassau and stand with the old men on the docks, enought to bet with them about which bird will fly off a wire first. Five dollars a bet.
He always loses.
"I don't gamble," he'd told Anne Cathgart, one snowy night in Berlin, when she tempted him with plane tickets to Monaco.
"Of course you do, Nathan," she said with a dark chocolate smile. "Just not on card games."
The memory of Berlin is the memory of bone-rattling chills, night after night, of snow in his eyes and wind chapping his skin, itchy cheap wool and overpriced liquor. His apartment was old and poorly heated. He slept in sweaters and spent as much time as possible in the office. It must have been summer there sometimes, but he only ever remembers the cold.
It was in Berlin that he vowed he would die someplace warm.
Not on a tile floor like Anne. Not in a cellar like Schmidt. Not in a snowbank like Roland the stenographer, who had a heart attack that last frigid January, before they left for Beirut. Roland spent 22 years at the bureau and smoked a carton of Camels a week. When an old lady found him frozen near her bus stop, he wasn't wearing any socks.
Another Caribbean sunset that defies the powers of poetry melts into the sea. Nothing on earth is cheaper than booze in the Bahamas, and when he runs out of the scotch Gladys gave him, he learns to like rum.
He drinks a lot these days. He plays a lot of chess.
When Nathan was seven years old his mother took him to the ocean. They stayed at a little hotel in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and Nathan picked up sandy shells all day long and brought them to his mother, who sat reading under a striped umbrella.
By the end of that first day, the top of his head was lightly pink with sunburn and he had built a wall of shells all around her, but the high tide rushed in and washed it out again. His mother only laughed.
"You can build it again tomorrow, Nathan," she said, and tucked the book under her arm, and led him off to a dinner of fried shrimp and hush puppies. That night they slept under an open window, and the waves rocked them to sleep, a metronome of crash and silence.
He hears from Gladys infrequently. She sends postcards with the Washington Monument and the White House on them. The first one said, simply, "Fired," but beneath the word she'd drawn a smiling face. The next one bore a photo of the Pentagon, another smiling face, and the words "Hired again."
He never writes back.
There is a picture by his bedside that arrived in the mail the same day as Gladys' two-weeks-late Christmas card. It is of a smiling baby boy in blue pajamas, with a Boy Scout cap drowning his newborn head. On the back, in a man's strong scrawl, is written, "Nathan Thomas Bishop, born November 15, 1991. 7 lb. 2 oz. 19 inches long."
Nassau is close enough to the equator that sunsets linger in a blue haze just over the watery horizon for hours after the flaming orange light disappears. Night never completely falls; even at 2 a.m. the lights in town blot out the lowest of the stars.
And in the evenings when he can't sleep, he sits on his gray-weathered porch, eyes closed, planter's punch singing in his veins, and listens to the tide wash the shells he's collected back into the sea.
I have changed my name so often I've lost my wife and children But I've many friends And some of them are with me ...